global warming

What’s Causing Global Warming?

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Bloomberg has created a nice interactive to explain the cause(s) of global warming. Hint: it’s not the volcanoes or the Sun or ozone pollution. The cause of global warming is almost surely the greenhouse gas emissions.

global_warming

From the caption underneath the graphic:
Researchers who study the Earth’s climate create models to test their assumptions about the causes and trajectory of global warming. Around the world there are 28 or so research groups in more than a dozen countries who have written 61 climate models. Each takes a slightly different approach to the elements of the climate system, such as ice, oceans, or atmospheric chemistry.
The computer model that generated the results for this graphic is called “ModelE2,” and was created by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which has been a leader in climate projections for a generation. ModelE2 contains something on the order of 500,000 lines of code, and is run on a supercomputer at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This is Our Fate: What Could Disappear

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This op-ed in The New York Times doesn’t mince words. Global warming is real, and many parts of the world will simply disappear if the sea levels rise:

Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.

Don’t miss the excellent interactive to go along with the piece, showing which cities will fall if the sea level rise.

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone goes to zero.

An interesting way to start the week, don’t you think?